American nights entertainment
are the two most expensive things on earth--comfort implying whatever
degree of luxury is essential to a state of mind in which one can
do work to purchase continued comfort. At sixty, though one may now
and again bounce it high in the air, the real and right concern is
to keep the ball a-rolling.... Let people think what they like and
say what they like (and the follies of attack and fence are always
equal), the unerring perception is directed toward the next thing that
is to be written. One may exercise a choice from the very limited
amount of material one has or can acquire; at sixty, it is too late to
acquire much additional. Of course, a finely cultivated imagination
in early years might come to the rescue with a second blooming; but
suppose one’s imagination has always moved in the best society? No, it
doesn’t do, it most decidedly doesn’t do to speculate any longer about
anything; let others pretend what they like, there is a positive relief
in the knowledge that one writes what one can when one has to--and be
it good, bad, indifferent or astonishing the aim was an honest aim and
the result achieved was, at least, intelligent.
iv
And what could place Mrs. Wharton in a clearer, finer light than
just this situation of fact? What could be more in keeping with the
two traditions that have bound her life?--the tradition of an older
New York and the literary tradition of France, both strict and both
congenial, both so severe as by their very classicism to give the
greatest possible scope to personality. The New York of the Age
of Innocence into which she was born, the literary Europe of the
nineteenth century to which she so early attached herself--these were
the ideal forcing-beds of a personality such as hers. You come upon
her expressing in vigorous words her delighted enthusiasm for the
first novel of William Gerhardi: “You not only make your people live,
but move and grow--and that’s the very devil to achieve. Do, for all
our sakes, keep it up!” There is no flabbiness about her. She is past
the pitfall of fanaticism and safe beyond the quagmire of adulation.
She does not need to practise the conventional literary dishonesties
which close like traps upon novelists whose fame is on the make and who
still have much to lose. She can say frankly: “There are moments--to
me at least--in the greatest of Russian novels, and just as I feel the
directing pressure of the novelist most strongly on my shoulder, when
somehow I stumble, the path fades to a trail, the trail to a sand-heap,
and hopelessly I perceive that the clue is gone, and that I no longer
know which way the master is seeking to propel me, because his people
are behaving as I never knew people to behave.” What heresy! Here we
all are kneeling on the ground, touching foreheads and breathing the
overpowering incense burnt before the shrine of Dostoievsky, and a
voice is distinctly heard to remark that the literary deity is perhaps
not as luminous as he should be! How many would dare such a remark, or,
if they ventured it, would command from any of us the bravery of timid,
relieved assents? Not many; scarcely a one.
She has not always been so free; who, indeed, is born to freedom?
Saint Paul said he was, but a price had been paid formerly; it always
is. Henry James, tormented to the end of his days by the fact that
his books really didn’t sell, wasn’t able to pay the price. Thomas
Hardy paid it at the cost of silence as a novelist after the reception
accorded to _Jude the Obscure_. O. Henry, confronted with the heavy
total, shivered and shuddered. Every man has his price, indeed, in
quite another sense from what that saying was coined to convey; it is a
price he must manage if he is to have the truth for himself or tell it
about others.
Mrs. Wharton’s greatest good fortune has probably consisted, after all,
in her realisation of this. Did she learn it in France, that country
where truth lies at the bottom of a well ... and is not drawn up but
used as a mirror? You can see the perception through nearly all of
Mrs. Wharton’s work. In her long novel of eighteenth century Italy,
_The Valley of Decision_, she is painting away with grand strokes on
a magnificent canvas; she wants to find out if she really is suited
to the execution of fictions like the _Romola_ of that George Eliot
she once read so attentively. Well, no; the result satisfies her that
she isn’t. So then she goes on with those short stories in the writing
of which she is so proficient, and, a few years later, produces _The
House of Mirth_. The result is instructive; one might almost say it was
destructive. Mrs. Wharton definitely learned that here was a kind of
thing she could successfully do, in terms of money and popularity. But
in other terms?
This was a question less easily answered. Two years after _The House
of Mirth_ came _The Fruit of the Tree_, with its highly interesting
“problem” as to whether it can ever be right for a physician or nurse
to accelerate and ease the death of a doomed patient. This has been
called, by the Folletts, Mrs. Wharton’s “one lapse into artistic
disintegration.” But Mrs. Wharton was not thinking of art, but of life.
It had sharply come over her that the pursuit of art in one or another
form of preciosity would land her where she didn’t wish to be landed.
She might be, as was charged, the woman who of all women wrote most
like a man; but she didn’t desire to write like some men. If she could
have been Gustave Flaubert, perhaps ... but she saw no use in being
George Moore or--Henry James? The whole contemporary French school
left her unaffected; she read them, but experienced no wish to write
like them; and in the midst of a freshly-running sea of Continental
literature she became more than ever aware of her absolute and
inescapable Americanism. In a way, it was a tragedy. To think that one
could grow up in Europe, be, as it were, a part of Europe, definitely
adopt Europe, and yet not to Europe belong! After steadily eyeing this
situation for a while she reacted without either tears or temperament;
and her reaction took the form of a short novel which is among the most
perfect pieces of workmanship in English, the story of _Ethan Frome_.
The “hard shapeliness” of that tale was the hard shapeliness of a
full self-recognition, the so-called “sterility” was the result of an
individual adjustment to the deepest personal need of her remarkable
nature. What she would once have so wanted to give, she now knew she
never could give to the world, and her awakened consciousness strove
for the fit expression of this discovery in terms of an art of which
she knew something. _Ethan Frome_, whatever else it may be (and it is
many things, some strange and all beautiful) is the Magnificat of a
woman in the hour of profoundest personal disappointment. Such works of
fiction are especially rare, but, given the genuinely capable writer,
given the one hour of a lifetime, the masterpiece is quite possible,
yes, almost certain.
Ah! She had written it at last ... and she could afford to let it stand
there to her credit while, with calmness and admirable fortitude she
returned to the region of _The House of Mirth_ and _The Fruit of the
Tree_ to add a study of divorce and parasitic marriage called _The
Custom of the Country_. The resumption of the general warfare which has
been the custom of Europe during odd generations for several centuries
didn’t interfere with _Summer_ (1917), wherein Mrs. Wharton tried to
combine her established “material” with some of the qualities of _Ethan
Frome_--an experiment only moderately a success. When she came later
to write _The Age of Innocence_ she was, to all appearances, in the
happy position of desiring only to do a definite and modest thing,
a first-rate story of very marketable quality, and then achieving
something distinctly beyond that.
v
Mrs. Wharton’s new novel, _A Son at the Front_, is primarily a study
of character and a portrayal of the relation between a father and his
son. The father is Campton, a lame painter of some distinction living
in Paris. His son, George, has just finished his education and the
father is counting on a trip to Italy for the chance, at last, to get
acquainted with the boy. Campton’s wife, Julia, after divorcing him,
married a rich American named Brandt. The two also live in Paris and
George has for some years been supported by the Brandts, spending part
of his time with them. With this position when the novel opens, end
of July, 1914, war intervenes, taking George from them because of his
French birth. Campton and Brandt, drawn together by a common interest,
pull what wires they can to secure a clerical appointment for George.
The intensity of the war and initial reverses bring Campton to regret
that George should have been willing to remain behind the lines. But
word comes that the son is lying wounded in hospital; he has all the
time been at the front but has concealed the fact in writing home.
Brought back to Paris, an effort is made to keep him there, a shallow
little married woman of George’s acquaintance lending what help she
can; the huge compulsion of the war is too great, however, and on his
return to the front George is again wounded, this time fatally. He
lives to hear that America is at last in the conflict and to know that
Campton and the rest have an undivided aim while the war lasts. When
George dies, the others, feeling they have lost everything except the
hope of victory, bend themselves to help toward that with such courage
as they have left.
The record of wartime Paris, the shift of ideals and the gradual
sacrifice of all lesser purposes, the resolution of smaller loyalties
in a larger, the intimacy of personal emotions--these, of course, are
the true substance of Mrs. Wharton’s story.
vi
You may comprehend her, in discourse with that familiar of hers, the
Time Spirit, in a dialogue running somewhat as follows:
TIME SPIRIT: So, then, you’ve settled it with yourself? You haven’t too
many regrets, I hope?
MRS. WHARTON: Oh, no, thank you. You can’t know what a sense of
freedom, of satisfaction both outer and inner, it gives! You see, I
always had, for ever so long, a few illusions--about myself and my own
work, I mean.
TIME SPIRIT (_dryly_): Most writers do. But now that you are rid of
them all, you aren’t finding it impossible to go on?
MRS. WHARTON: I find it far more possible to go on. I go on with ease
and a lightness of heart. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t write now,
that I mightn’t wake up and find myself to have written, except the
kind of thing I once was determined to write. That sounds cloudy, no
doubt; but what I mean is very simple: I discovered that, contrary to
the old saying, it is life that is long and art that’s fleeting.
TIME SPIRIT: Yes?
MRS. WHARTON: Exactly. We live a long time, and we write for a time not
so long but pretty long, too. If in those years of writing we achieve
art once or twice, we are among the rare, fortunate ones.
TIME SPIRIT: And the rest of the time?
MRS. WHARTON: The rest of the time we must be industrious, but it is so
much better if we are clear in our own minds about it.
TIME SPIRIT: But, you know, you are really an artist!
MRS. WHARTON: _Retro me, Sathanas!_ I beg your pardon, though; you
couldn’t tempt me. I know what I know. There are things I have had,
and have, to do without; but I don’t live with them; I live with what
I have. Of course, all kinds of aims, and quite possibly some forms
of achievement will be conferred upon me by those who practise the
craft of fiction under the guise of criticism. But I am clearly not
responsible for what they say, and it may not be used against me. I am
only responsible for what I myself say--and that is: Nothing.